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Review Summary

William Eubank’s “The Signal” demonstrates the fine line between paranoid science-fiction fantasy and demo reel. Both involve impressive visions of reality reimagined, and both defy logic extravagantly and yet somehow casually, too. Mr. Eubank’s diverting but disconnected film might fairly be described as a little bit of each. In the movie’s road-trip run-up, two hacker buddies, Nic (Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah (Beau Knapp), set out to ferry Nic’s girlfriend, Haley (Olivia Cooke), to her new university. The boys become fixated on the taunts of a devious Internet show-off, who sends them on a detour to an empty bunker in the sticks. After a brief excursion into found-footage horror, Nic wakes up in one of those antiseptic, white-walled secret compounds used for human experimentation in the movies.
— Nicolas Rapold